Jacob Alon is the kind of artist who could wring tears from Thom Yorke himself, if only because their music captures that perfect, painful sweet spot between melancholy and ecstasy—like Damian Rice, if he’d stopped sulking in a Dublin bedsit and started mainlining glitter.

Their latest single, “Liquid Gold” – yes, named after the poppers, because of course it is—is a shimmering, serotonin-spiked gut punch about the doomed pursuit of connection through the flickering ghost-lights of online dating. The tragedy of modern intimacy: fleeting, disposable, and yet, somehow, still desperately beautiful.

Alon takes to the stage in what can only be described as industrial fairy couture—bejewelled leather kilts, mesh tops, floral crowns, and glittery eyeshadow that looks like it was applied by Tinkerbell in Studio 54.

It’s giving Midsummer Night’s Dream meets Berlin warehouse rave, with just a dash of B&M Bargains bags with stage props haphazardly chucked towards the back of the stage. Raw, chaotic, and unapologetically real from start to finish.

And yet, beneath all that dazzling, delightful absurdity, there’s a voice—soft, unsteady, and utterly arresting. When they open with “Sertraline”, the room of 500 Glaswegians—noisy, drink-slinging Glaswegians—falls so silent you could hear a phone vibrate (and we did later in the set) It’s a feat that even Yorke himself, patron saint of the Sad Lads, might struggle to pull off.

The setlist reads like a diary entry scrawled in eyeliner on the inside of a crushed-up Rizla packet. “Don’t Fall Asleep” is a song “about a horrible thing that happened and the nightmares it left behind,” Alon admits, with the kind of sincerity that makes you feel like they’re opening a wound just for you.

“Confession” is a heart-bruising swell of guitar harmonies and ghostly keys, a song that shimmers in the air before stabbing you straight in the chest.

Then, in a moment of absurd brilliance, they pivot into a cover of The Korgys’ “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime” only reworked into a much filthier, much funnier “Everybody sucks and fucks sometimes.” It’s hard to get a room of weary, winter-battered Glaswegians to genuinely belly laugh on the last Friday of January, but Alon does it—because that’s what they do. They pull you in, gut you, and then wrap you back up in a tinfoil blanket of absurdity and joy.

There’s no encore. Because, as Alon says, encores are fake. Instead, they close with “Liquid Gold”, that glittering, tragic anthem to desperate connection, breathless pleasure, and the ever-widening gap between the two. A trumpet player emerges from the wings, Alon submits to the spit-and-sweat closeness of the moment, and we all watch an artist teetering on the edge of something truly magical.

The night wasn’t just about the music. It was about radical acceptance, about the queers and the outsiders and the fighters, about turning a Friday night gig into a full-throated “fuck you” to fascism. If there’s any justice, Jacob Alon won’t just break your heart—they’ll be filling rooms far bigger than this one in no time.

Article: Angela Canavan